Low Temperature Co-fired Ceramic Multilayer Microwave Passive Filter Technology Research

Nowadays low-temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) technology is becoming a pivotal means for integrating passives. Thanks to this new technology that has the greatest ever flexibility to layout conducting circuitry in a three-dimensional fashion, many new compact passive circuit implementations that were considered impossible to realize with traditional processes have been used for various wireless applications widely, particularly for radio frequencies (RF) front-ends. Among various passive components, people usually pay the most attention to the filter, which is one of key devices of RF front-ends. Passive multilayer filter based on LTCC for radio frequencies is a new type complex module satisfying requirements for miniaturization, lower cost and higher frequency in the development of modern electronic system. In this thesis, the design and simulation of passive multilayer filter in LTCC substrate have been studied.Due to the parasitic effect between the passive components that are largely used in the RF system and consume large area, integrating passives is extremely important for improving integration and reliability of RF system. The possibility to integrate passives inside the LTCC module is the important aspect when dealing with the high-frequency applications. These passive components can be used as basic building elements to make a passive filter.First of all, by using the method of extracting equivalent circuit, simulation and experiments, embedded capacitors and inductors in LTCC are analyzed respectively. The thesis presents an effective method for the design and modeling of LTCC embedded capacitors and inductors, based on which the multi-layer capacitors and inductors are designed and realized. The measured results agree very well with the electromagnetic designed responses, which shows the validity of the design and implementation. By investigating electrical properties and physics characteristic of planar inductor and vertically interdigitated capacitor (VIC), a series of valuable laws for design have been obtained. It can be seen that multi-layer structure is better for smaller area and higher electrical performance.Then combining traditional lumped-element network synthesis method and...